Promise Me This (54 page)

Early one morning, as Connie finished reading Michael’s temperature, he opened his eyes. She studied him for his glassy, nonseeing probe of the ceiling, but he looked directly at her. He breathed, his chest slowly rising and falling. His voice cracked, but he whispered, “Connie.”

She stared and gasped, too startled to speak.

“Connie?” he whispered again.

“Yes! Yes, Michael! I’m here!” Tears streamed down her face.

His brow furrowed. “Why are you crying?”

Connie laughed and cried and laughed some more.

That night Connie wrestled with her pen and writing paper. Twice she penned a letter to Annie, telling her of Michael. Twice she tore it in two and threw it into the grate.

Annie will likely be married by the time my letter reaches France. What good will learning of Michael do her? Might it not do more harm than good—play the mischief in her marriage to Phillippe?

Connie rationalized, aloud and in silence.
Michael will need someone to comfort him when he learns Annie has married another. Why not me? Perhaps, in time, he might . . .
But she dared not finish the thought, not even in the privacy of her mind.

Just after midnight, she turned down the lamp and climbed into bed. But a pricking conscience made a poor pillow.

Michael was moved ten days later, back to the convalescent home. Connie visited each morning and evening, before and after her shift. She had come to love smoothing the black curls from his forehead, stroking the soft indentations of his temples.

She brought him the duffel of his belongings, the things he’d left with her parents when he’d sailed for France in search of Annie three years before, and helped him sort through those treasures of home.

Though his hands still trembled in weakness, Michael grasped Aunt Maggie’s Bible and held it to his lips.

Connie helped him hold a spoon and then a fork until he was steady enough to feed himself. At last he worked the buttons of his own clothing and, in a few days, walked the hallway, back and forth.

Each day, as he gained strength, he asked Connie about Annie—where she was, why she had not come to visit him. “Before I could open my eyes—at the hospital—I heard her. I know she was here!”

Connie did not have the heart to tell him that hers was the voice he had heard; hers were the hands that had soothed his brow and washed his face; hers were the lips that had kissed him good night.

She could not bring herself to tell him that Annie, believing him dead, had married another. Even to her, knowing Annie’s good, if feeble, intentions, it smacked of betrayal after all Michael had done, after his pursuing, unfailing love.

Michael was already packing his duffel when Connie stopped in the first week of June.

“Where are you going?” she demanded, but her eyes told him that she already knew.

“To find Annie.” He stood and searched her face. “I don’t know why you won’t tell me where she is. I appreciate all that you’ve done for me, but you know why I’m here—why I came to England, why I charged over to France.”

Connie sat down heavily on the cot between them. “I do know. It’s why I’ve not wanted to tell you.”

Michael stared at her, sat down beside her, took her hands in his own. “Tell me. Where is she? What’s happened to Annie?”

He saw that she struggled to begin.

“We thought . . .” Connie met his eyes. “Annie thought you were dead—that you’d died in the shelling.” She looked away.

Michael held his breath.

“And she was injured.”

Michael pressed Connie’s hands. “Annie’s—”

“Oh, she’s all right now.” Connie’s color deepened. “But she was badly injured in the lorry crash—after the bombing. She was nursed at a hospital in Paris and later by a woman and her son in the countryside.”

Connie pulled her hands from Michael’s, stood, and began to pace as though she could not bear to look at him. “She needed to begin a new life, you see.”

“A new life?” Michael repeated the words.

“Yes,” she said, looking back at him, clasping and unclasping her hands. Feebly she shook her head. “After the war—we all had to begin again.”

Michael did not understand the pleading in Connie’s face. But a weight beyond his own began to descend upon his chest and suck the breath from his lungs. Michael stood, steadying himself against the iron rail at the head of his cot. “What do you mean, ‘begin again’?”

“She’s married,” Connie said at last. She raised her chin as though the telling was a battle she must face. “Annie married Phillippe Fondrey—the son of the Frenchwoman who nursed her.”

“What? What did you say?” Michael narrowed his eyes, trying to focus on what she had said. But her words were impossible.

“Michael—”

Michael stepped back against the wall, shaking his head from side to side. “No. I don’t believe you.” He tried to sort the words that had spilled from her mouth, tried to comprehend why she would tell such a cruel and horrid lie. But the suffocating, leaden weight dropped like a stone-sharpened ax—a grinding, pounding ax that ripped his body from neck to groin.

Married! My Annie’s married another!
The phrase flashed over and over through his battered brain, ready to explode like the lights on a short-circuited marquee.

“I didn’t want to tell you—not like this.” Connie reached for him.

But Michael pushed her away, turned his back, and covered his face with his hands.

If the words had not come from Connie Sprague—Connie, who had nursed and visited him daily, who had supported his pursuit of Annie Allen through the battlefields of France—Michael would have called the speaker a liar and a thief. Only a liar would say that his Annie had married another. Only a thief would steal his heart, his life, his dreams.

But she would not take it back. And in the end, he knew Connie spoke the truth. He knew because hope and life had failed him before. He knew because his dream was greater than he had a right to dare to dream. He knew, most of all, because Annie, his loving Annie, had not come.

Michael penned a letter to Aunt Maggie two days later. He would not be in England for her reply, but he trusted that she and Uncle Daniel would want him, though he failed to bring their Annie home. It was a long letter, but he did not want to tell the story in person. He never wanted to tell it again, once he set foot in America.

And that is the tale of my wanderings, Aunt Maggie. Had it not been for Dr. Narvett and Connie Sprague, I do not know what might have become of me or if I would ever have been able to let you know. I am sad and sorry for the grief I have caused you. The grief this war has brought us all is beyond my imagination or ken.

That I cannot bring our Annie home—for you, for me, for Owen—is the greatest defeat I have known this side of childhood. The war and all that I’ve seen is nothing to compare.

I ask you, Uncle Daniel, to do something for me before I come. Tear Owen’s white double roses from the ground—the ones I planted for Annie. They were to be for her bridal bouquet. I know I never said that; I never dared. But it was a hope I carried every day. I cannot face them now. The roots can be planted elsewhere, if you want to propagate them for sale. I don’t care—but not in Annie’s garden. Please.

I sail on 13 June and am scheduled to arrive in New York on the afternoon of 20 June. Do not trouble to make the trip. I shall take the train to Philadelphia and on to Swainton.

Your loving son,

Michael

The afternoon before Michael left England, he visited Bunhill Fields and Owen’s grave. He smiled in spite of himself at the meager bouquet of yellow roses in his grasp.

Blue flowers, the same form of lobelia he’d planted in New Jersey from Owen’s seeds, just the color of Annie’s eyes, spread over the whole of his friend’s resting place and that of his father and mother. He did not know the little flower’s botanical name, but he knew he should not have been surprised. “Owen’s Thumb,” he said. “That’s what I’ll call you pretties from now on.”

He sat on the bench nearest his friend’s grave and told him the story—the long, long story. He told Owen that he was sorry he’d not brought Annie to America as he’d vowed, sorry that he had lost her and failed her.

Michael ran his hands over Owen’s stone and, standing, took in the nearby gravestone of John Bunyan. He saw on one side the relief of a man burdened by a terrible weight, and he understood the image; he felt that weight in his own life.

On the other side he saw that the man had dropped his burden, having found and laid hold of the cross. “I don’t know if I can let go,” Michael whispered. “I wish I could. I wish I could.”

Connie saw Michael off at Victoria station. He thanked her for the box lunch she had packed for him, for all she’d done—before the war for Annie and during and after the war for him. He kissed her cheek, held her close, and was gone.

Long after the train pulled from the station, Connie stood alone on the platform, her hand pressed to her cheek.

That night, over tepid tea, Connie absently sorted the day’s mail.

A letter from France, in Annie’s hand, had been posted from a port Connie could not quite make out and rerouted twice. Rather the worse for wear, it had arrived on the Spragues’ doormat three weeks after its posting. Connie shook her head and fussed aloud at the state of the British mail since the war’s end.

She contemplated the date on the letter and the fact that the return address gave Annie’s maiden name. Silently she swallowed, noting that the nasty bile of a false friend did not go down easily. She moistened her lips and squared her shoulders. A sudden ache sprang between her temples as she slit the letter’s seal.

Dearest Mr. and Mrs. Sprague and Connie,

I hardly know how to begin. I have disappointed dear Phillippe and his precious mother. I pray that you will not be disappointed in my breaking of my contract with him. But it has come to me that my acceptance of his proposal was, like so many things, an acceptance of what life offered or demanded of me. It was not my heart’s choice—simply a following of the stream as it flowed toward the sea, a path of least resistance, one meant to appease and please others. As though pleasing others fulfilled a proper laying down of one’s life—the kind of sacrifice our Lord gave for us, the kind of sacrifice Owen gave for Michael and for me. For the first time I realize that it does not. There is a marked difference between sacrificial love and the destruction of God-given boundaries of the soul.